A blog that supposed be about the writing life, in gory detail, but is really a bunch of essays on whatever the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks I want to write about.

08/05/2013

As my wife starts her own blog on the transition of being 40,
I am reminded that I am in my own transition. Jenny’s transition involves
returning to the world of adults after five years of raising our young
daughter, Cerridwyn. My transition involves buying a hat.

I wouldn’t call this a midlife crisis. Thirty-six isn’t
exactly midlife these days. I don’t think so, anyway. I’m still young, though
teetering on the edge of Not-Young. Besides, I sold a sports car rather than
buy one. And I replaced it with a hat.

This has only made sense to a few open-minded people, but
then again I’ve only bothered to explain to a few. The lovely Japanese woman
who runs one of the schools I work for didn’t get it.

“I sold my Mustang and bought this hat.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s hard to explain. It’s a way of letting
go of my youth and reclaiming my sense of self.”

“Nani? I don’t understand what you are saying.”

Yeah. I felt the need to explain it to Kumiko, not because she
was entitled to explanation, and not because I burned with some self-conscious
obligation to justify my new hatness. I wanted to explain it to myself in the
simplest of terms—language barriers often force you into that.

It worked well enough for myself, if not for Kumi.

Okay, so, the hat: a cheap knockoff ofHerbert Johnson’s “The
Poet.” That symbolism is clear. What other hat does the Writer wear? But this
hat is famous. Harrison Ford wore it as Indiana Jones. It came with a little
Indiana Jones pin sewn into the band. Jenny ripped that sucker off for me. It’s
not his hat anymore, it’s mine.

Indy was my first hero, and I wrote my first short story in
the fourth grade. It was called “Indiana Jason and the Temple of Bananas.” It
was four pages, front and back. Indiana Jason chased the bad guy into a cave,
and, like young David against the giant, he slung a rock into the villain’s
belly button—the belly button, because besides the butt or the nuts, which would
have gotten me in trouble, that’s the funniest place to hit him—and the villain
melted into a gelatinous ooze. Then, just as Indiana Jason was about to leave
the cave, from the ooze on the cave floor arose Farrah Fawcett and Loni
Anderson. In bikinis. They flanked the young hero, and off the three of them
walked into the Great Whatever. The story was a hit amongst my 10-year-old
peers.

I would forget about Indy during the prolonged identity
crisis of my post-adolescence. I bounced back and forth between majors:
history, pre-med, pre-law, political science, communication, journalism,
education. It was during this time of being pulled apart by possibility that I
got my first new car, a white 1998 Mustang.
I made a symbol of it immediately,
equating it with the white horse the hero rides into the sunset. Justine, what
I named the car, was my steed, and ride off into the sunset we did, into every
sunset we could find. One sunset found us at the banks of the Mississippi River,
reading Poe and scrawling our own verses. This was about the time I decided I
should become a writer. Clearly I was a romantic. And romantics write.

This identity would take a long time to set in. I’d never
really envisioned myself in the role before. Perhaps it should have been
obvious. Every English teacher I ever had pushed me in that direction. I’d won
contests, achieved a “Distinguished” rating on my writing portfolio in high
school. Eventually, I was getting paid
to write.

But here’s the thing: In the fifteen years since I had
decided to become a writer, I had never really felt like a real writer. I felt like a wannabe who may be kidding
himself. I enrolled in Spalding University’s MFA program only on the suggestion
of a friend. I’d never heard of the school or the degree. The door opened and I
went through it. I had no idea when I got there I’d be surrounded by people who
already had master’s degrees, who already had books published, who knew what
was meant by “story arc.” They told Moby Dick jokes. I’d never read it, just
pretended I understood and laughed on cue. They
were writers. I was in over my
head.

Well, I graduated. I became a teacher of writing. I got a
few things published. But even though I’d started calling myself one, I still did
not feel like a writer. I wondered if
ever would. I wondered at what point I would feel justified calling myself that.
Would I feel like one if and when I published a book? Would the book actually
have to sell? I still haven’t received any sort of check from a publisher.
Could I call myself a writer when I finally get one?

So, this summer, at 36 years old, I reached a moment of
truth for myself. I was measuring myself by the wrong criteria. Justine sat in
the driveway rotting. I’d long stopped driving her. She wasn’t quite right for
baby car seats. I came to view her as the last vehicle of indecisive youth in
my life. I didn’t want to sell her. She was a part of me. We’d been through a
lot. I’d put her through road warrior hell. Selling her felt like selling my
youth. Selling her, in a way, was buying into an adult identity. I was a grownup.
I should act like a grownup. I was a writer. I should act like a writer.

My mother used to say, “Dress for the job you want, not for
the job you have.” Now, what she meant was suit and tie and spit-shined shoes.
She did not mean an Indiana Jones hat. But after, I don’t know, 20 years of
hearing her say that, I finally took her advice. I couldn’t have my white
horse, but I could decide to step into a role I’d wanted to step into for a
long time. I am a writer. I wear the poet’s hat. I wear the hat of my first
hero. I become Indiana Jason, sans bimbos. Indiana Jason does not need bimbos,
or white horses, or anybody telling him whether or not he is a writer. He is one.

In the end, the hat is not a fashion statement. It’s a life
statement. It’s a statement of my identity as Writer.

07/04/2013

A few years ago, sitting across from a former boss at a
Chicago restaurant, I was informed by the Man he was thinking about hiring a
large number of Filipinos to write for him. He could get five of them for about $2000 a
month. That’s what I was making. Just me.

When perusing so-called freelance writing websites, I
discovered just how dime-a-dozen writers can be. I don’t want to call so many
of them whores, but…$1.25 per article? That was the brokered price, so the
writers actually took less. I wouldn’t take $1.25 per tweet.

Recently I was informed of open positions at a ubiquitous
online university. Sixty grand. Benefits. Work from home. Sounded like a dream
and it was. Part-time internals considered first, later I was told they had
3100 applicants for 315 jobs.

The first time I heard something like that was 2005. I
applied to a local TV news station for a low-level, low-paying news teaser
writer spot. The man on the phone replied, “I don’t know why there are so many
applicants for this job.”

Last fall, when inquiring about the status of my poetry
manuscript, the publisher informed me my book was one of 916 being read and
considered. I have not heard back again.

A state university in Indiana is offering professional
teachers with advanced degrees a whopping $26,000 per year. Hey, plus benefits!
Slightly more than the assistant manager at McDonalds, who doesn’t have
crushing student loan debt.

Previously, in 1999, before the world changed, before
dotcoms busted and hiring freezes hit, I was getting interviews and job offers
at great places before I had even
finished college. After that, they wanted 5-7 years experience at entry level.

Fourteen years later, it’s pretty much stayed that way:
professionals fighting for entry-level positions. Severe competition is the new
normal, and it’s sure hard to feel special when every pond in the world is now
a great lake. I don’t want to get into a treatise on globalization. Not even
sure how I feel about it other than so far not so good, “inevitable” as it is.

But it is concerning knowing how secretive the US government
is being about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would pretty much complete
the globalization process by applying free-trade principles to relationships
with Pacific countries like Japan, Australia, Peru, etc. SuperNAFTA means ponds
are about to get bigger. Given our experience of globalization over the past
decade or so, it’s not surprising the highest levels are concerned enough about
public opposition that they’ve classified the information. It’s huge
news in Japan, I’m told from the Japanese nationals running Kentucky factories.

In terms of careers, there really were good old days. Now
and in the future, it appears if you’re not at the absolute top of your game,
you float to the bottom with the carp. There will be no middle.

07/03/2013

It’s too bad such a great phrase has become such a writing cliché.
The last time I heard it, the quote was attributed to Stephen King. Before that I had heard it was
Faulkner. Neither is true. It was a snooty old prof at Cambridge warning writers about the dangers of ornamentation. This was about the time the grumpy and irritatingly correct William Strunk was leading his own rebellion against flowery
Romantics across the Atlantic. They were sick of all that pretty and wanted
writers to just get to the point. You think in a time of locomotives and world
wars, people have time for your damnable puffery?

There seems, too, a divide over the meaning of the phrase. I
had understood it to mean that one must have the guts and self awareness to
acknowledge when a passage doesn’t work and then slash its pretty throat. It
doesn’t matter if you love it. You are not objective enough to really make
that determination until weeks or months later once the proverbial bloom comes
off the rose. Once it does, kill it. Murder that beautiful piece. But that may
be too rational an understanding of the phrase. Another interpretation is that
you should kill your darlings precisely because
you love them. If you, the author, are in love with a particular word
coupling or tagline or paragraph or passage—kill it dead because you’ve
probably dumped a whole bottle of literary maple syrup onto a pile of sugar-coated
honey-glazed word donuts. So pick your favorite part and kill it because the
audience will resent your self-indulgence. The audience, who may not be
familiar with the phrase, at least share King’s actual and less eloquent
opinion: Stop trying to be brilliant and tell the $@#!&! story.

There’s truth to it. And many writers, myself included, have
to go through this phase of cheap ornamentation before learning to pare it down
to its essential elements. Spare writing. Stark writing. No-hiding writing.
Hemingway and Carver made it worse, inspiring a generation of writers
following their lead. You see it in modern poetry, among the long lasting
movement of what I call Zen poems about bees and flowers. Modern poetry doesn’t
rhyme, doesn’t need structure, and for Pete’s sake don’t write about love unless you want to look like a kitschy poser. Perhaps part of the darling-killing movement is this (modern) desire to not be moved by fairy tales any longer. We
consider ourselves mature, not subject to the whimsy we once were. We're serious creators and serious connoisseurs. Don't tease us. Show us real life. The modern
world is sleek, fast, to the point. Modern literature is a knife. And it’s a
kind of blasphemy to dislike Hemingway and Carver.

Well, consider me blasphemous. I’m not indicting them. Many
have loved these authors and that’s okay. Love them. Write like them, if that’s
possible. As for me and my house, we like a little sugar.

The Philosophy of Spare survived even the post-modernists, the
too-smart-for-the-room Warhols, and is backed up by the proliferation of online
literature. Blog posts should be short, theses obvious. Stories—cut them down
to 500 words. Make whatever you write small enough to fit into a Twitter feed,
tiny little chocolate morsels of truth as people go about their surfing, their realities fragmenting in real time.

But at the same time, back in the world of books, the kids
everyone doubts the future of (don’t sweat that, kids, happens every
generation) are buying books thick enough to use as booster seats. Yes, some
have glittering eterna-teen vampires in them. But some of them have much better
kinds of magic created by authors who set out to write something beautiful and
perhaps ornate. And you know what? How else would the literate youth rebel
against their forerunners? By reading the same stuff their parents read?

After 100 years or so of Modernism and Post-Modernism,
someone told me we were entering a literary phase of neo-realism. Lord, I hope
not. Nothing worse to me than realism in fiction. Please, please, please don’t
spend three pages telling how a plow works. Actually, I think we’re going back
farther than that. Perhaps the steampunk rage is a better indicator that
fantasy and romance are en vogue—and I hope for a while.